


An Ode to Caffeine

by jane_potter



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan)
Genre: Coffee, Conversations, First Kiss, M/M, Massage, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-19
Updated: 2009-09-18
Packaged: 2017-10-26 04:28:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/278689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jane_potter/pseuds/jane_potter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Jim and Batman had coffee, one they really didn't, and the relationship they built in between.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**1\. Folger's Dark Roast**

It was the first time that Jim had ever seen the value of kitchen lights which brightened and dimmed via a sliding tab, rather than the simple flick of an on-off switch. After all, everybody had managed to live without variable dimness for decades before _haut_ decor had come along with its stainless steel and ultra-utilitarian lack of handles on any of the drawers... Now he was damn grateful for it; he touched the tab with two fingers and carefully raised the lights to the barest glow possible, not even enough to filter outside through the closed curtains.

The cowled figure in black hunched over his kitchen table might have been more comfortable with no light at all, but damned if Jim was going to wrap a sprained ankle in the complete dark. It was an acceptable compromise.

Fleetingly, Jim felt a pang of guilt go through him. When the family moved into the new house shortly after his promotion to commissioner, Barbara had loved the kitchen instantly, and perhaps even more than the window frames that didn't leak and the bathroom that didn't smell faintly of mildew. She would have hated that Jim's only appreciation for the adjustable lights was that they were convenient for Batman.

"I've only got Tylenol," Jim said softly, fumbling the handleless cabinet open and pulling out the bottle. Tablets clacked in the silence. "But it's extra-strength. Water?"

"Coffee," Batman murmured.

"It's old."

"Even better."

 _You_ would _like the dregs_ , Jim thought, with just a touch of irony. _Bitter and concentrated_. "Milk, sugar, brandy?"

"No."

The microwave's glare was too bright, its noise too loud as the coffee reheated. Jim knelt and started to seek out the latches on Batman's leg armour. The back of his neck prickled with awkwardness, embarrassment.

With battered Kevlar and rough nylon beneath the pads of his fingers, it really sank in for the first time that this man was truly that, just a man. Huh. Somehow he _had_ started to believe the urban legends of a winged mutant who slept upside-down in a cave below Gotham's sewers.

"On the outside of the knee," Batman rumbled quietly. Jim found the latch a moment later. _Click_. And ah, the suit _did_ come off. Another myth busted. Except the plate hung loose but refused to slide off. A moment later, Batman directed, "Boot has to come off first."

"Ah." Those ties were easier to figure out, metal bindings that contoured tight around the ankle, instep and lower calf. Solid support, there, but they had to be heavy as hell to walk in, let alone run or jump. Jim wrapped his fingers around the boot, changed his grip twice; a fingertip pressed too far into a tread on the sole and hit another hidden latch. Something detached from the boot's sole and clattered to the floor-- a little oblong of black plastic and metal, probably worth about five grand, quite possible very explosive.

"Sorry," Jim muttered. He tugged.

Batman's breath caught sharply, a pained cry from the kind of man whose massive shoulders shed blows from crowbars and two-by-fours like water.

"Sorry," he said again. "One second."

Jim stood and got the coffee from the microwave, Tylenol from the counter. Either utterly ignorant of the awkwardness that plagued Jim or pragmatically ignoring it, Batman took four tablets and washed them down with half the mug at once. The long swallow of blistering bitter caffeine was accompanied by no flinch or grimace.

Suddenly Jim felt a little more at ease, finding some small common ground in the abstract way of men who spent considerable time subsisting on coffee and painkillers, who found their lives intersecting at such godforsaken hours of the night that they had tension headaches and terrible breath and cheeks stubbled by shadows long past the five o'clock mark.

"Open the braces," said Batman. Even his baritone was hushed in deference to silence.

"What-- this?" Growing more frustrated, Jim touched the metal splints locked against either side of Batman's boot, tight to his ankle and calf. Then, abruptly, Jim comprehended how they held the man's injured ankle immobile. Faint appreciation for the contraption made his irritation lessen slightly. A little fumbling had the braces sliding up, back into the sleeves in the vigilante's shin plate that concealed them.

 _Ingenious_. This was no ordinary Kevlar suit, meant just to stop bullets and knives-- it had actually been designed for a man who would sustain injury and have to keep on fighting, who would need built-in splints and separate plates that pulled off individually in order to bind up wounds without removing the whole thing.

Finally, the boot came off, but not without considerable struggle. Gentle as Jim tried to be, there was no denying that Batman had to grind his teeth and grip the table's edge so hard that his glove creaked in strain. Jim drew a startled breath as he saw, for the first time, just how horridly swollen Batman's ankle was.

"Could be broken," he muttered self-consciously, carefully prying off the shin and calf plates. Something else clattered to the floor-- a _knife_? No, a lockpick, concealed in its own sheath just behind Batman's knee. And was that a wire saw tucked just inside the top of the discarded boot?

No ordinary armour indeed. Even SWAT teams didn't carry such gear as a matter of routine.

Tugging off the sock and rolling up the cuff of the tight mesh bodysuit, Jim ran gentle fingers over Batman's ankle, swollen flesh hot with blood. Ugly purple bruises marked his skin, appearing even deeper and darker in the kitchen's dim light.

The first time, Jim dismissed the noise as a stifled hiss, biting his lip with concern at how tightly he had to wrap the bandage in order for it to work at all. The second time, however, he very clearly heard a soft, low insistence of, " _Gordon_."

Looking up in startlement, Jim abruptly found his face very close to Batman's, whose head was bowed, blade-eared cowl framed by the dim halo of the overhead lights. His mouth was vulnerable with pain and the dark eyes looking down at Jim were soft, bright brown, and so very young with exhaustion and gratitude.

 _Dear god_.

The breath froze in his chest.

"Th--"

"You don't have to thank me," Jim interrupted quietly. "You'll never have to thank me."

There was a long, tentative moment. Then one corner of Batman's mouth slid up in the first genuine smile Jim had ever seen on him.

"This is very good coffee," he murmured deliberately, as if that was what he had meant to say all along, and Jim ducked his head to hide the answering smile tugging at his mustache.

 **2\. Vanilla Hazelnut Cappucino**

"It's Montoya's fault," Jim said immediately, when Batman froze up solid after his first sip. The beverage was creamy, sweet and thick with foam-- vile stuff for a man who preferred his caffeine like mammoth-sucking tar-- but that was the way Montoya had dropped the pot of coffee off, knowing little that Jim wouldn't be drinking half of it. "She's in charge of the coffee maker after eight these days. Gets a little too fancy when there's a pile of paperwork waiting for her."

Batman made the smallest dissatisfied noise possible, his mouth pursed just slightly as he took another swallow. Typically, he wouldn't complain. Instead, he sank back into the shadows behind Jim's coat rack, dark glove concealing the white porcelain of his mug, and went back to staring at the missing persons reports that Jim had tacked to his corkboard.

Out of the corner of his eye, Jim couldn't help but watch. The slight rise and fall of Batman's mug to his lips was almost hypnotic, each absent sip taken exactly fourteen seconds after the last. Jim doubted the timing was deliberate; more likely it was Batman's autopilot, spurring his beaten body with caffeine while his mind mulled feverishly over the reports.

Somewhere behind those intense black eyes, scenarios were unfolding, timelines were being constructed and unravelled and rebuilt, psychological profiles were being assembled; the Batman was drawing his own conclusions while the preexisting theories of Jim's detectives were being dissected for flaws; old case files were being opened from the vast archives of a memory whose capacity and precision was nearly inhuman, hundreds of little details in the current kidnappings being run through a mental comparison to prior crimes in dozens of other cities and states that would normally take a computer to process. And if Batman's brilliant, frightening mind came up as blank as every other had, he would slip back into the night and take the problem to his computers, his extensive records, his secret backdoors into hundreds of databases that he should have never had access to but obviously did.

This was a side of Batman that Jim hadn't seen until only recently. The bridge of trust between them had, at some point, by some massive shift in their relationship that Jim hadn't even noticed, been made solid. It was only in looking back that Jim could see just how truly tentative their partnership had been before.

And yet-- without Jim knowing what he was missing, their earlier state of partnership had felt like the epitome of stability, much as the current one did. Could it be that, however open this new relationship felt, he was still getting only a fraction of Batman's trust? Was he still being screened for loyalty, still being denied communication and having information withheld from him?

 _Leave it, Jim. Of course you're not getting the whole picture. You don't know his name, his face, his age, his hair colour-- hell, even his favourite food. Of course he's censoring your databases; every time somebody enters his DNA into the system from a bit of blood at a crime scene, it never comes up with a match, and it disappears from the system within hours._

Christ, if they hadn't had a fight of fucking Biblical proportions the first time Batman had tampered with Jim's evidence archives like that.

 _But you know how his armour comes off, and you know how he drinks his coffee. He's giving you little things. Personal things. Meeting halfway is too much to ask. Maybe an eighth of the way is all a vigilante can afford. It'll do_.

And so Jim had come to know the genius behind the brute, the sheer magnitude of knowledge that Batman possessed. Thirteen languages, plus American Sign, Brail and Morse code; the equivalent of Master's degrees in psychology, kinesiology, law, cryptology and, surprisingly, 19th century literature; tactical brilliance that would have had him at the head of an army in another century, and technological intuition that could have easily made him a groundbreaking scientist in his current lifetime, if not for the rage that ground at Batman's psychological wounds like glass and salt, fostering infection, preventing catharsis.

Unless-- and it was entirely possible...

Well. It wasn't entirely unusual for scientists to be reclusive, eccentric to the point of insanity, and very rich from their inventions. It would explain how Batman possessed technology that didn't exist even in the government's labs. It was... if Jim had really been interested in finding out the man's identity, it _would_ hypothetically be worth looking into.

If.

Which meant that the unexplored possibility was just going to keep on bothering Jim at night, dammit.

"Ah," Batman breathed, breaking the silence. A hard smirk curled the corner of his mouth.

Jim turned around in his chair expectantly, grimly delighted, waiting for the explanation. Whether or not it was his mind making the connections, cracking a case always ignited a hot burn of triumph in his chest-- and, as Jim met the brilliant, angry, haunted eyes of a broken genius whose inner demons ran far too close to the skin to claim sanity, he knew that Batman felt it, too.


	2. Chapter 2

**3\. 100% French Roast**

Moving as though every joint in his body was wrapped in barbed wire, Jim sat down across the table from Batman. The vigilante stared silently at him, dark eyes following Jim's every move as the commissioner pushed a cup of coffee across the table at him. Against his light-absorbing Kevlar bulk, the three pairs of handcuffs jammed tight around his wrists sparkled too brightly in the interrogation room's halogen lights.

"How very considerate, commissioner," Batman purred, and the voice that emerged from his mouth was harsh, taunting, ugly in a way Jim had never heard before. Jim's spine crawled. "How civilised, considering the kind of brutality that goes on in these rooms. Caused some of that brutality myself, as I recall."

Jim's lips thinned. "What do you know about the bomb threat at City Hall today?"

"Push me and I'll cause some more," Batman uttered softly. "I don't think you'll like it so much from the other side of the glass."

 _Play it up, Jim. He's holding up his side of the act. This man kidnapped your family, killed the DA, remember_? Nausea roiled in Jim's stomach. He tried to swallow it down with a sip of his own coffee, holding Batman's gimlet-eyed stare.

"What. Do. You. Know. About the bomb threat."

Batman chuckled quietly. The level of derision in his tone would have been enough to make Jim flinch if he hadn't known it was an act.

"Unless it's that you like watching me break bones, dislocate shoulders, cuff people around like pieces of meat," he continued. His voice was a hypnotic, visceral hiss. Beneath the slippery fabric of his cape, Batman's shoulders rolled slowly, like a predator loosening muscles for a leap. "You seem to, the way you let me slide through your fingers again and again and again. Come on, _Jim_ \-- really. Are you trying? Or is the incorruptible Jim Gordon finally too _scared_ to mess with the monsters in the dark?"

"You triggered the alarm system in the basement of City Hall and fled, then resisted arrest when we cornered you in the sewers," Jim ploughed on, hoping he sounded more impatient and loathing than terrified beyond belief. "Officers found a partially assembled--" _Partially dismantled_ , was the truth-- "--bomb on the scene. Any more of those we should know about?"

Batman rolled his eyes and said nothing, an ugly smile playing at his mouth.

"You're looking at a life sentence as it is," Jim snarled. Cold sweat beaded beneath his collar. "I swear to God I'll see you on death row if _one_ person gets blown up by something you've so much as _looked_ at."

And Batman _laughed_ , long, loud and grating, the sheer wrongness of the sound hitting Jim like a fist to the gut. Teeth bared, shining, in some feral semblance of a grin, the cowled man sat back in his chair, insolent and arrogant. Black eyes flicked down to the coffee still steaming on the table before him.

"Hoping for a DNA sample, Commissioner?" he sneered. "Chasing your tail a little here, aren't we. But I'll give you one, then-- not that it'll do you any good."

"You sonuvabitch," muttered Jim, and if his nails bit into his palms hard enough to leave swollen purple crescents, the action would be mistaken for rage on the surveillance video.

"Go call your wife, Commissioner," Batman whispered. "Go make sure she's still answering the phone all the way over in Philadelphia. Go make sure the kids are still in their beds, the window's not blowing open in the night."

And with a last grin of lazy satisfaction, the vigilante picked up his mug in both hands, handcuffs clinking against the porcelain, and drained it in one gulp.

The chair skidded backwards and flew over as Jim stood abruptly, palms slamming onto the table. "Get him out of here," he snarled to the two uniforms who had been standing tensely just inside the locked steel door for the entire conversation.

They leapt forward immediately, a murderous light in their eyes that made Jim's insides clench. He turned away from the table and, as he stalked stiffly to the door, pretended not to hear the _thud_ of fists slamming into armoured muscle long before the noise of Batman's in-character struggles made such treatment necessary.

He knew that, if asked, his officers would swear up and down in court that the maniac had telegraphed some kind of intent to lunge after Jim's turned back. Internal Affairs would never lift a finger in interest over mistreatment of the criminal known as Batman in the first place, anyway.

Part of Jim was too ill to watch, to know how his officers still acted like street-rough mob enforcers even after he had forced them to stop taking the bribes that had run Gotham PD for decades. Part of him was sick to his stomach with the knowledge that his men were taking a thoroughly sadistic pleasure in beating a fucking _hero_ whose only crime was capital masochistic self-sacrifice.

Part of Jim had to turn away from the camera in order to hide his sigh of relief, knowing that Batman's clench-jawed silence was mostly due to the cellblock keys tucked under his tongue, which, in plain sight of the narrow-eyed guards and cameras whose footage would later be furiously scrutinised over and over to no avail, he'd gotten from the bottom of the cup of coffee Jim had given him.

 **4\. Gas 'n' Go Sludge**

"Slow night?" rumbled the shadow just beside Jim's left shoulder in a voice like grinding boulders. Jim didn't so much jump as-- well, he _turned_ abruptly towards the sound, found himself far too close to Batman, who had probably expected him to leap backwards instantly and therefore assure a respectable distance between them, and...

Well, yes. Then he jumped back.

"Until now," Jim replied tartly, slopped coffee dripping over his fingers. There was no denying, however, that his shoulders sank with relief as his startled heart slowed. At some point in the recent past, the faint void of a predatory cowl against Gotham's pervading sodium-glow twilight had become not only a reliably regular sight, but a welcome one.

It had been three nights since the vigilante known as Batman had broken out of the heart of Gotham PD lockup in a mad, full-on assault of the entire building that hadn't been equalled since the Joker had blown up half of the MCU. A reckless rookie taunted too near to the bars had inadvertently provided his escape route. The young man hadn't even realised that Batman had managed to unlock his cell door until the vigilante had exploded from it, seizing the rookie in a chokehold and putting the man's own gun to his temple in, literally, the blink of an eye. Jim had missed half of the maneuver the first time he'd seen it on tape.

Within three minutes, Batman had incapacitated seven cops, knocked out four, and traded hostages three times. Discarding one in order to bolt down a hallway or dive behind cover, he had then seized a different hostageas soon as he found the opportunity and needed leverage. His final sprint right out the main entrance had left frustrated cops unable to fire upon the vigilante for fear of hitting somebody in the bullpen or on the street.

"Long week," Batman growled. He pressed a number of heavy sealed envelopes in Jim's hands, exchanging them for the cardboard cup of throat-stripping red-eye caffeinated tar that Jim offered wordlessly. Coffee had become an unspoken constant between them, no matter the hour or case. Picking up a second cup with his own order was nearly habit.

Fingering the glued envelopes, Jim replied simply, "Had us all swamped."

Jim recognised the signs of a lightning-fast information drop and didn't bother to waste time waiting for even a few sentences of the small talk he had come to anticipate during the vigilante's irregular visits. The meaningless, mundane comments were stilted and often expressionless, occasionally reluctant, sometimes outright resentful when Batman was in a foul enough mood, but nonetheless they were nearly as constant as the coffee, extended like a peace offering for Jim's patience except when circumstances truly prevented it.

"Red Rat gang's moving in on the docks."

"Got your note about that. Told the street beat."

"Put a wire in Judge Marshall's office."

Jim accepted a number of thin plastic CD cases that appeared from beneath the cape."Should get the DNA results back on the Rathers case by tomorrow," he informed in return, tucking the recordings inside his jacket.

"Got a ballistics match to the Harkeld murder."

"In the envelopes, I take it."

"Still looking into the new ADA. Do you trust her?"

"As far as you do. Take it you're off to check on her now, then."

"Sorry about the fuck-up last week."

Batman handed his now-empty cup back to Jim, and out of reflex Jim kept his mouth shut-- it was a gesture of the meeting's end, which Batman did not drag out once he had decided to leave, and they both disliked it when Jim was left talking to empty air.

Then the meaning of the last words sank in.

As he stared at the abruptly vacant spot right in front of him, Jim's mouth fell open in disbelief.

The apology had been spoken so curtly and expressionlessly, exactly like the rest of the briefing, that its significance had flown completely over his head. The single sentence playing over and over like a loop in his head, Jim suddenly felt a strange vertigo.

It was as if the world had turned upside down and he'd just... missed it. How was such a thing even _possible_? He didn't know which was more mind-boggling-- the apology, the curse, or the fact that he'd completely noticed _neither_.

Licking his lips nervously, Jim simply stood for a moment and thought.

"Glad you found the keys useful," he said finally, just in case Batman was still lurking in a nearby shadow. Then Jim walked back to his car with what he felt was incredibly laudable calm, given that he figured he'd just received the equivalent of a plea for forgiveness on bended knee, and was utterly dumbstruck at the turn his partnership with Batman had just taken-- like driving straight off a cliff in a direction that was frighteningly close to friendship.


	3. Chapter 3

**5\. Spicy Viennese Espresso**

The moon was silver and whittled away to a mere sliver in the sky, washing the gravel road and dense forest on either side of it with watery light, barely enough to whiten the aspen leaves as they turned in the wind. He had never been down this road before, but Batman had given him the location for their next meeting after a number of shadowy, too-close-for-comfort photographs of Batman had shown up in the latest papers.

Barely a mile down the twisting side road that branched off from the highway out of Gotham, Jim could no longer see the city lights. From where he was parked on the side of the road, facing into the moon as it rose feebly over the treetops, it felt as though he were in a different state, a different world entirely.

Gotham had vanished, and before him lay a nameless road that led into the darkness, a velvet midnight whose veils, for once, concealed only the promise of unviolated nature, of whatever could possibly be found amid the deep thickets and old forest, steep hills and chalky tumbledown crags whose faces had been exposed at the sides of the road by time's erosion, the loamy earth stripped back to reveal jagged bands of rock that fluttered with creeping ivy and precarious saplings whose roots gripped their ledges with tenacious strength--

"Oh good god, man, you haven't slept in two days," Jim groaned, gently knocking his forehead against the steering wheel. "Enough with the hyperbole, you romantic old fool."

Letting his head rest against the steering wheel turned out to be a bad idea. Within a matter of seconds, he had fallen fast asleep.

*

"Gordon." A hand gripped his shoulder gently. " _Gordon_."

Very, very slowly, Jim cracked open his right eye. No matter how exhausted he was, he had long ago lost the habit of moaning and grumbling upon being woken from a much-needed rest. Jim had once conducted a half-hour conference call on the police department's annual budget requests with Mayor Garcia and the new DA without ever once giving either man the slightest inkling that the call had woken him from a dead slumber at two in the afternoon, or that he had been on sick leave with the flu, running a fever of 102 and occasionally shivering so hard that his glasses slid down his nose.

Presently, Batman's cowl distinguished itself from sleep-blurry haze of moonlight and shadows in the car, the graphite ears tilted in such a manner that Jim realised the man was sitting in his back seat, leaning forward to touch Jim's arm. Brown irises reflected silver and tiny crow's feet stood out at the corner's of Batman's eyes, delineated from the black greasepaint by the strip of decolourising moonlight that fell across them, picking out the fine creases and lines that mapped too-long hours of observing more corruption and suffering than one man ought to handle alone. But now his eyes were quiet, his hand on Jim's arm nothing more than a resting weight, and Batman waited patiently.

"Hello," Jim said eventually.

"Hello," Batman replied awkwardly, after a moment. Jim could easily imagine the furious debate over how to reply that had been conducted in Batman's head in that half second of hesitation. It made him smile faintly.

Arms folded over the steering wheel, forehead pressed against the cool vinyl, Jim peered at Batman with one half-open eye for a while longer. Eventually, he sat up in his seat. Batman withdrew quietly, settling back into the shadows of the back seat. Their eyes met in the rear-view mirror.

"You wanted to talk."

"I'm not sure it's worth bothering if you won't be able to remember anything I say."

It took Jim a long moment to realise he was being needled. He squinted at Batman's reflection, feeling a moment of disappointment that he couldn't make out more than the vigilante's silhouette, the negative space of light-absorbing armour and figure-distorting cape.

"I'm awake now."

Silence. Jim was about to repeat his assertion when there was a slight tap against his elbow. Bewildered, he reached back and accepted the thin metal flask from Batman. Jim swished it gingerly, answered with only the gurgle of the slightest empty space.

"I know better than to think this is booze, but I can't for the life of me understand where you stow this away on that suit."

"Guess."

"In your belt?"

The cowl shook negative in the rear-view.

"Against your lower back."

Another shake.

"...Not in the jockstrap."

The muffled snort of laughter made Jim pause, flask halfway to his open mouth. Batman's eyes flickered to his in the mirror, suddenly wary. Jim could well imagine the type of mental castigation the man was giving himself.

Taking a breath to say something to break the tense silence, Jim caught a whiff of the flask's contents and found his words frozen (whatever the hell they were going to be, anyway). Eyes very wide, he cautiously raised the canteen to his mouth and took a sip.

Rich, dark, velvety caffeine flooded his senses, the cold espresso instantly smoothing his sore throat as it went down. Jim's mouth watered at the traces of cream lingering on his palate, and something spicy teased at the aftertaste. Hints of cinnamon and cloves tasted like Christmas, sinking straight to the root of his tension headache.

Flask frozen at his lips, Jim let out a long, shaky breath.

"That is dammed good coffee," he said hoarsely, after what seemed an eternity of drowning in luxuriant flavour. Unable to stop himself, Jim took a second long sip and swallowed it slowly, eyes closed.

He made to screw the cap back on reluctantly, only for Batman to mutter, "Go ahead."

"Damned good," Jim murmured, gratefully tipping the flask at Batman's reflection before taking another pull. His eyes closed and he sank back in his seat. If Batman wanted to talk business, he could start any time-- Jim only had to listen, anyway.

"It helps with the headaches," Batman said unexpectedly, instead. "And the forty-eight hour nausea."

"I won't ask how you knew I hadn't slept in two days."

"There's a surveillance camera on your house. You know it's there."

Something was wrong with the conversation, something not unpleasant but simply too easy. A long moment lapsed before Jim realised the problem.

They were having-- by every definition of the word, and not simply the loosest possible interpretation-- an actual _conversation_. Two equal participants. A discernable subject and line of coherency. Back and forth, statement and reply. No interruptions or sentences left hanging to empty air.

"I," he said, suddenly at a loss for casual words now that he realised they were _supposed_ to be casual. "I know. And it does. Help."

"Doesn't do much for the backache, though."

"Er. What?"

"The backache you get from sleeping hunched over your steering wheel." Jim winced ruefully at the rebuke. The figure in the back seat shifted slightly. "When I first saw you like that, I thought you'd been shot."

"Oh," said Jim awkwardly. "I. I'm sorry. It's been a hell of a week. Hell of a month." He scrubbed his face wearily. "Year. Whatever."

When big, heavy hands reached up from behind either side of the driver's seat and came down on his shoulders, Jim nearly jumped out of his skin.

"Wh-what--?"

Then his words stuttered off in a gasp. Jim's eyes threatened to roll up as he arched involuntarily into the powerful thumbs digging into his knotted shoulders. After a long moment, the intense pressure receded, only to return again, lancing deep into his muscles.

"Jesus _Christ_ ," he hissed through clenched teeth.

"Pressure points." For a man with such a tremendously thunderous voice, Batman could speak surprisingly softly without losing the distorting rasp, as barely-there as it was in his murmur. "I know it hurts."

Eyes closed tightly, trying not to flinch away from the steel pincers at his shoulders, Jim waited out the next push. Well, it didn't exactly _hurt_ , but it sure as hell wasn't pleasant, the immense crush of fingers that could easily snap a man's arm digging into his sore muscles with what felt like all of their monstrous strength-- but as Batman relaxed his grip once more, Jim could already tell that his muscles had loosened considerably. The dull headache that had been lingering at the base of his skull all day was almost gone completely.

Unable to believe it, Jim laughed breathlessly, "Don't tell me you're a masseuse, too."

The low _humph_ behind him could have passed for a laugh, even without any considerable stretch of the imagination. "I use it on myself. Can't exactly go into a massage parlor with bullet wounds beneath my shirt."

Batman's hands slid downwards, fingers framing the sides of Jim's ribcage as his thumbs sought out the lower edges of his shoulder blades, pressing up into the hollows below them. Jim tensed in fresh pain, sharper and more intense than at his shoulders. Batman paused, rubbing more gently for a good minute to relax the stiffness before attempting to dig in once more.

Riding out the wave of pain, Jim gasped, "We don't exactly have a normal relationship, do we."

"I think someone like me precludes the possibility of normality right off the bat."

"Very funny," Jim muttered.

"It was atrocious. I make no apologies."

Full sentences from the Batman. Strange. An actual sense of _humour_ , wry and quick and just a touch cocky? Stranger yet. And... not at all unlikeable.

It wasn't until Jim had finished the entire flask of coffee and Batman was deliberately kneading the last traces of tension out of Jim's back, apparently content to continue at length, that Jim dared to ask at last, "What was it you had to tell me, then?"

As Jim had known it would, his question broke the moment completely. After a moment of hesitation, Batman pulled his hands back-- casually, calmly, but the vigilante was definitely sounding a retreat.

"Go home and get some sleep, Gordon," he rasped softly. His usual growl was tempered to something roughly affectionate, like a lioness grooming her cub with a tongue as harsh as a woodfile.

Then, without another word, Batman stepped out of the back seat of the car and vanished into the darkness of the woods, leaving Jim sitting there in silence.

 **6\. Aprés Café**

The briefing was straightforward and short, conducted on the darkened back porch of Jim's empty new house. Barbara had liked the yard for the kids' safety. Jim liked it for the fence and trees that gave him enough privacy to talk with the city's most wanted criminal on his very doorstep.

Four months ago, Jim would have suspected that Batman showing up for a meeting that consisted of two updates on ongoing cases and one mention of a _possible_ smuggling ring was the vigilante's way of making Jim feel like he was in the loop, that he brought something to their partnership. There really was little explanation for it, otherwise.

Two weeks after their bewildering, quietly intense meeting on the back road, however, Jim had had more than enough time to pick apart every single incident that had lead up to it, draw a second conclusion, second guess himself out of nervousness and then go over everything all over again, only to come up with the exact same answer.

Leaning against the railing of the porch, Jim watched with shrewd eyes as Batman glanced around, taking in Jim's empty hands once again. The briefing was well over by Batman's standards-- at least five seconds had elapsed since they'd finished talking-- and yet the man remained.

Brown eyes cut in Jim's direction, head tilted slightly in question.

Jim blinked slowly at Batman and refused to play the game. _Use your words_...

"No coffee tonight."

"Haven't started depending on me, have you?" he jabbed lightly.

It was the wrong move. "I was under the impression that it reassured you to have some kind of routine," Batman snapped, "but if that's not the case then I can stop wasting time here."

"If anything's a waste of time here, it's the game you're playing," Jim retorted, "whatever it is."

"Who's playing?" growled Batman.

"Not me," said Jim quietly. "And I didn't take you for that type until that-- that thing in the car. I'd still like an explanation, but if you won't tell me, I think I pretty much get the picture."

A long, tense moment passed. Batman clenched his jaw, realising that Jim wasn't going to accept nonverbal cues, and spat, "What, then." It came out too loud in the silence. The commissioner regarded him with patient, steeled eyes.

"We've been having coffee for nearly six months, son," Jim said gently. "I think you can skip the excuses and come inside by now, if you'd like to."

Batman's eyes were unfathomably dark. "And if I don't want to?"

Jim's stomach dropped. _Oh Christ. I read this all wrong. I read everything wrong_. "Then you can go," he said, sounding calm even over the ringing of his ears, "and we'll pretend that we didn't have this conversation and I haven't had near enough sleep and we'll go on like this never happened."

Dazed, he turned and walked over to the door, pulled it open. Humiliation chewed at his insides, heart and lungs clenching.

" _Gordon_."

One foot in the door, Jim stopped. He hoped the darkness hid his burning face. _For god's sake, you're divorced and middle-aged and grey and ought to be retired, what did you_ think _was going to happen_?

Whatever he was expecting next, it wasn't the quiet, tentative voice that asked, "Can we start this conversation over?"

Slowly, heart pounding, Jim turned around.

From across the porch, Batman looked at him steadily, mouth tight, shoulders tense.

Somewhere between warning and pleading, Jim said softly, "Don't play games with me."

"Ask me inside again," Batman replied, equally as quiet.

Jim took a deep breath and closed his eyes. "Thank you for the information. I-I don't have any coffee made, but would you like to-- to come inside?"

"I--" The hesitation was audible, visible, tangible to every fiber of Jim that was waiting on razor edge, and fear was suddenly written in the rim of white that showed in Batman's momentarily wild eyes before he plunged on-- "--would like to. Thank you."

He crossed the porch in four cautious steps, cat-silent. Standing before Jim, deliberately close enough that their breaths touched each other's faces, Batman said hoarsely, "Coffee isn't necessary."

"I do believe you're nervous," Jim murmured in surprise, backing into the house without taking his eyes off Batman.

The vigilante followed him in, closing the door behind himself with barely a whisper of the latch. In the nearly complete darkness, Jim felt Batman's presence so very near to him, slippery cape brushing his fingertips, armoured chest grazing Jim's arm as it rose and fell with Batman's breathing.

"Terrified," Batman whispered hoarsely. Jim knew how dearly the single vulnerable word cost him, and that, more than anything else, was reassuring. "The last time I tried--"

Instead of finishing the sentence, Batman let it die. The silence told Jim all he needed to know. He'd guessed as much.

Hesitantly, Batman turned his head a bare few inches, touching the roughness of his jaw and the cold lines of his cowl to the side of Jim's face, pausing gingerly before leaning in a little farther and solidifying the contact. His lips touched Jim's earlobe. Shallow, warm breaths stole over his neck, sending shivers down his back.

"We're taking this slow," Jim said quietly. The order reassured himself as much as it was meant to Batman. "And no matter what, Gotham comes first."

"You put me in jail if you have to."

"You let me die if you have to."

Moving as though Jim were made of something as fragile as spun sugar, ready to collapse if he dared press too hard, Batman rested a hand against his lower back, hovering, silently frightened. "You can... accept that?"

 _Barbara couldn't_. "I know this city," Jim said simply instead. "I've been here too long not to."

Letting out a long breath of pain and relief and gratitude, Batman pressed harder against him, the embrace tightening. Jim leaned into it, heart racing, and tried not to fumble as he pressed a hand against Batman's side in return. The vigilante jumped. Then, shuddering, he inhaled shakily and relaxed.

Silently, leaning against each other and breathing deeply, they stood together in the dark for a long time. At last Jim raised a hand to touch the side of Batman's face, fingers spreading over the hard jaw, scraping stubble.

"This is a new house," he murmured, tilting his head up to look at Batman with hooded eyes, "and I don't believe you've been given a tour."

Maybe Batman's eyes had adjusted to the blackness better than Jim's, or maybe he had simply caught the low undercurrent of Jim's voice. Through the hand still resting against Batman's side, Jim felt his shudder.

 _Middle-aged and grey? Please. He shivered when you just_ looked _at him. You still got it, Jimbo. Sexy is_ not _just for the young_.

The line of Batman's throat bobbed. "In case I need to know my way around if you're ever held hostage here."

Jim laughed, unable to believe his ears. Something like delight sprang up inside him at the honest-to-god genuinely professional intent in the vigilante's reasoning.

"Actually, it was more of a really poorly-veiled excuse to show you the bedroom," he said wryly, stroking the pad of his thumb across Batman's rough cheek, "but sure, then. That's as good a reason as any."

Perhaps it was only fitting that Jim didn't get to actually see the smile that Batman gave him. Instead, in the darkness, he felt the shift of muscles beneath his thumb, the tautening of lips that curved up into a shy arc. In some kind of awe, Jim brushed his fingers over Batman's lower lip, following the chapped line back and forth-- once, twice. Three times.

"I'd like that," Batman rumbled softly, his teeth closing gently on just the tip of Jim's finger. "I'd like that very much."


End file.
